Falling (5 page)

Considering that this was supposed to be their idea of fun, they didn't look happy at all.

Jude looked sideways at Schrader. With his brutally cropped blond hair, a grey shirt buttoned to the neck, and that permanent scowl, he could quite easily pass as a third member of the negotiation team.

Which left her, in a KENSAL PUNK BOYS T-shirt and old jeans, looking like a hanger-on, a streetbird, or simply a complete idiot.

‘This is ridiculous,' Schrader muttered. For the first time in a dozen or so glancing, ill-tempered encounters, Jude thought he looked nervous. ‘The entire city must be here.'

The fence had been turned into a billboard, hung with damp cardboard signs advertising everything from lab-grown piata crystals (Instant Improvement In Karma Is Guaranteed) to certified organic cannabis. In the few gaps between signs and posters, someone had woven stems of lilac, drooping now in the mid-morning sun.

Inside, every inch of ground between the gate and the Serpentine had been seized by an invading army of stallholders, streetcorner preachers, hawkers, ladybirds, mollys, and every other variety of the great urban unwashed. It sounded like a riot and looked like an explosion in a colour-blind designer's clothing shop. Jude found herself suddenly terribly sure she didn't want to go anywhere near it.

But she was still walking, propelled by fear of embarrassment and the cluster of bodies at her back, and the crowd seemed to be expanding out of the park to meet her in a fog of bad deodorant, ganja smoke and perfume.

At the gates, a woman dressed as a tearful clown pressed a leaflet into her hand. ‘Official day of mourning for the planet, come and do your part.'

A sudden surge of escaping children – pickpockets, probably, off to unload their haul – swept them apart. Tiny fingers plucked at her pocket and withdrew, foiled by closures keyed to her fingerprints alone.

Welcome to the Claustrophobia Express, move right down inside the car please, we've plenty more to squeeze aboard.

Hinke, the short one, pushed his spectacles further down his nose and squinted over them at the crowds. ‘Your Green Urbanites, I presume.'

‘That's right,' Schrader chipped in. Jude got the feeling he was setting things straight now, before she could step in and ruin them for him. ‘SoftGreens, the media call them. They advocate anti-technology, back to the land policies, but they're still quite happy to take government food rations and barter vouchers.'

‘As are most of your people, it seems.'

‘Only those who, for some misguided reason, choose not to participate in the new society we're building in the Hursts.' Schrader smiled thinly at the seething crowds, as if pitying them. ‘We continue to provide their basic needs, but we can't justify providing all life's little luxuries here, at enormous cost, when a full and meaningful life is available to them in the Hursts, any time they wish it. If they choose to reject that, well, that's their choice, isn't it?'

Beck and Hinke nodded wisely, exactly on cue.

Jude was thinking of her mother, emerging from yet another benefits office with some browbeaten clerk yelling after her, ‘If you won't consider the work available, Ms DiMortimer, then you're deliberately removing yourself from the system. Well, if that's your choice…'

‘C'mon,' she said, forcing herself to head directly for the densest concentration of bodies. ‘Let's party. Do you think they sell candy-floss?'

Schrader's furious stare burned into the back of her neck as she walked away.

Lighten up, tight-arse. Compared to the mess I'm trying to sort out, you don't even know what a problem is…

She hadn't always been scared of crowds. She hadn't been used to them, growing up in the creeping depopulation of the Bankside, every year another building sliding into disrepair, home to stray cats perpetually locked in single combat with rats half their size. But she hadn't been scared. Not until the day of the Migration.

The shift out to the Hursts had happened quite gradually, for obvious reasons. There simply wasn't enough room on the roads to move sixty-three million people to isolated communities in the middle of nowhere all at once.

But somewhere along the way, the Government decided it needed a landmark, and designated one Saturday as Migration Day. Pushed the system parameters a little, shifted two million on the one day, mostly from the major cities. Carefully chosen people, of course. Smiling, photogenic people in designer clothes, with meek children and cuddly pets.

Confined to the apartment by her mother, who seemed oddly scared by the whole operation, Jude had spent the morning perched in the window seat, watching the chaos.

About a quarter of their block were leaving. She watched them lining up two by two, their bags on the ground between their feet for protection, as the wind raced screwed-up newspaper along the SideRide track and kids hung out of windows to spit ineffectually at them or call them traitors.

Considering all the stuff she'd seen on TV – gardens and rooftop pools and big soft beds with satin pillows – they didn't look that eager to leave. They were young couples, mostly, without children, so she didn't know them. Maybe her mother did, but she didn't seem interested in saying goodbye. Just clattered pans in the kitchen area and scowled at the TV reports as if they were some sort of personal threat to her.

Nobody in the Bankside had a car, of course. The permit alone cost a decade's wages. So the Government sent buses, big green or yellow buses driven by smiling fatherly men with neatly trimmed beards. And while the stupidly grinning couples were loading their patched and polished suitcases, and the cameras played across the crumbling concrete they were leaving behind, the riot started.

A lot of the Bankside residents had just never applied. They liked living somewhere where the police rarely ventured and all the shops still accepted easy-to-steal cash.

But some had filled in the forms and got back cheery letters saying there was no room for them just yet, or they were a little too far down the waiting list, and maybe they'd like to try again next year?

Looking back, she could see why. The Cowleys, whose kids wore police monitoring tags as a proud badge of criminality; the Syals, who ran illegal technology out of the disused Tube station, hawking anti-surveillance and top class encryption to anyone rich and paranoid enough to need it. Their next-door neighbour, Maya Keeley, supporting a tribe of loosely related children by cooking up a new variant on PCP in the shower cubicle. Not at all the kind of citizens the wage-slaves wanted in their brave new world.

It started with squabbles in the bus doorways, raised fists and shouted threats. Her mother had told her to close the curtains, but only in the quiet, automatic way she gave any order she was too tired to enforce. Jude, who knew the rules back to front by that stage, yelled back some garbled assent, and kept watching.

The bus drivers didn't want them on board, not without the right paperwork. The knives came out. The drivers started waving their anti-riot aerosols and pretending they had some idea what to do with them. Then the families and friends and whichever gang they'd been buying protection from barged in, and from there it was downhill all the way.

It wasn't a bad riot, for its time. Twelve dead, couple of hundred injuries. Couple of shiny new buses used for barbecues. The remaining children had wrung a summer's worth of fun playing among the charred bodywork. Too old for spaceship and pirate ships, Jude and her friends had colonised the smallest bus, gossiping and swapping pills stolen from their parents' medicine cabinets.

But on that day, three stories up, nose pressed to the glass, Jude had come to the conclusion that crowds were a bad thing, and it was probably just as well that, with the Migration and all, there weren't going to be any more of them.

Until now.

There were broad paths between the stalls, marked out with painstaking rows of white stones; but they were solid already, people dodging and squirming and sliding round each other. Clumsy, not used to it, and falling against each other by accident and design, trailing arms and legs and clutching hands. It was like Club Andro on the worst night of the year, but without any walls or corners to retreat to.

Schrader grinned down at her as she turned automatically away, and she had to pretend to be admiring the tat on the nearest stall, a scattering of beadwork bracelets and bottles of oils marked DO NOT INGEST.

‘Aura crystals,' someone yelled, inches away. ‘Guaranteed to see through false exteriors to the soul within. Read the inside, not the false flesh.'

She wondered about buying one and turning it on Warner. What was going on in there, under the jokes and the gentle hints? How come he kept sending her for those testing programs? She'd been twice as often as most people and he still insisted that names just came up at random.

Maybe she should have stayed and grilled Warner for a while. Literally, if necessary. Trap his fingers in his damn espresso machine. He was the key to all this. She must have been on an official mission when the, erm, accident happened. If she could only remember what she'd been doing in that building to get her defenestrated…

An elbow hit her in the back and someone coming from the side caught on her jacket, almost spinning her round. The air was thick with incense from the next stall, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't see, but she had to keep going.

Twenty yards from the first impassable knot of bodies, a failed contra flow between two stalls groaning with brass candlesticks and lamp-stands, Jude lost her nerve completely, and dived through the flapping canopies of the nearest stall into the quiet space behind it.

The grass was churned to mud here, and hours of preparation had trodden layers of evidence into the soil: candy wrappers, used rubbers, scraps of metal and paper and plastic. She imagined an archaeologist digging it up in a thousand years time and trying to decide what kind of arcane religious ritual had been performed here. The honouring of the almost-lost gods Gaia and Mammon, often believed implacable enemies, but getting on very well here, thank you very much.

Even muffled by the stall draperies, the sheer noise of the place shook her. Voices, bells, drums, howling children, sex-noises from the gaudiest tents. She should never have come here, that much was obvious. Maybe she really had made a mistake, corrected the wrong element of today. Maybe she should go back and talk to Warner, or not talk to Warner, or not go into the building –

The possibilities made her head spin.

Or maybe that was just the brazier smoke. Whatever they were burning in there was having a weird effect on the customers. Those two necking over there: well, one of them was dressed as a member of the Order of Chastity, and the other was hardly dressed at all.

And like it or not, she was right in the middle of the festival now. Which meant that whichever route she took out of here, she'd have to walk through a crowd again at some point.

Peering cautiously out between two stalls, Jude caught a glimpse of the glittering steel curves of the Millennium Bridge, and knew that was her means of escape.

Over the bridge to the other side of the Serpentine – open lawns, just a scattering of escapees who already found the drugs or the trinkets or the partner they'd come to snap up. Then skirt round the mess, and back to the car. She might even walk back to GenoBond. That would give time to cool down. A substantial change of plan, that was what her present-time crisis needed – a whole new approach to the day.

She edged along behind the stalls as far as she could, ignoring the curious stares of traders loitering in the gaps between tables. Mud clogged her heels, slowing her. Parted curtains offered glimpses of the heaving mass of bodies, transformed by distance into one amorphous creature, all flailing limbs and laughing, shouting mouths.

Finally, her channel of safety ran out: blocked by a trio of fortune tellers' booths, all made up in the same threadbare brown velvet.

Time to face her fears.

Sucking air like a drowning woman, Jude pushed her way between stalls, back onto the lank, trampled grass of the official path.

Where Schrader was waiting for her.

‘Thought we'd lost you,' he said, in a voice more disappointed than worried.

This seemed to be the quiet end of the festival; mostly thin, earnest-looking men with handfuls of leaflets offering Heaven On Earth Here And Now. They weren't making much of an effort to entrap even the few foolhardy souls drawn down here by the fortune tellers and a noisy machine-weaving display. They just sat there, staring into the crowd, leaflets fanned in their outstretched hands. Waiting for the fish to bite.

‘I took the short cut.'

‘Hmmm. Right.'

He didn't seem to be making much effort to blend in. No shopping, none of the rusty-pinned badges or printed sashes the campaigners and cultists were handing out. She tried to imagine Sour-face Schrader draped in pink silk declaring ‘Save Hunting Hounds' or ‘Ban The Combustion Engine', and found her imagination wasn't up to the task.

‘What have you done with your Germans?'

‘Don't call them that,' Schrader growled.

‘So what am I supposed to call them? Italians?'